I am currently doing some experimental work and I have a lot of data to trawl though. I use Gnumeric, and it's very good, but often I feel there has to be something better.

Ideally I would like the maximum number of features with a minimal learning curve, but really I'd just like to know if there is something better than Gnumeric that I can use for manipulating and plotting data.

QtiPlot is open-source, you can download the source from here: prdownload.berlios.de/qtiplot/qtiplot-0.9.8.3.tar.bz2 Like all open-source programs, you are free to edit this source code and compile it. However, the author does not offer free, up-to-date, compiled binaries. For this, you have to subscribe to a maintenance contract. I don't know if this is a good practice, but the program is worth the cost, and if you can't or don't want to afford it, you are always free to compile by yourself or to use the binaries that comes with any Ubuntu.
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nicocarboneJan 6 '11 at 0:18

however, qtiplot gets very very slow on ubuntu if the size of the data in a matrix is large, say 1K. Google says its a bug registered on launchpad. Any solution to this problem? (none given on launchpad)
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GuanideneApr 8 '12 at 11:03

+1 I used Matplotlib while making scientific report in the nuclear industry. Bonus : it is free software and Python offers you infinite possibilities. I do not say Matplotlib is trivial to master but it is really worth learning it. You have a good official documentation and could also get good support on stackoverflow.
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Maxime R.Jan 4 '11 at 20:42

I would suggest Gnuplot. It has a nifty set of features and is good documented. So if you take some minutes to skim through the documentation you'll get the basic idea. I use gnuplot for nearly all my plots, only when I don't need the full set of features I tend to use TikZ from LaTeX.

Sage is nice because it is open source and uses Python as a scripting language. The setup is similar to Wolfram Mathematica, which is also available in a linux version but the cost is fairly high.
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GaRyuFeb 1 '13 at 12:07

Is one of the best data visualization programs available. It implements the ideas of Edward Tufte, author of classics in graphical design and scientific communication as 'Beautiful Evidence' and 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information'.

The Deducer GUI makes it possible to use ggplot2 without requiring knowledge of the R programming language in which ggplot2 is implemented. If you can use excel, you can use Deducer. Your statistical analyses will be valid and your graphs (thanks to ggplot2) will be effective and pretty.

gnuplot and xmgr/grace are probably the oldest Unix scientific graphing programs. I still use gnuplot from time to time (BTW it is not GNU and some consider it not free), because I know it and I've been using it for many years, but it hasn't changed much in this century and it's not user-friendly according to today's standards.

I think that the most promising programs now are QtiPlot, LabPlot and Veusz.
The first two are similar to Origin (the most popular plotting software on Windows). QtiPlot has a full-time developer and it seems to be developed more actively. Veusz is different than Origin clones and unlike other programs it is written in Python. It's not in the distro yet, but it has PPA.

Another program that I use for plotting data is fityk. It is specialized in curve fitting and I use it for plotting mostly because I know it well (I wrote it), but I guess in most of cases QtiPlot or Veusz will be the best choice.

I would suggest DataScene. It produces really cool graphs and chart animations. I found the learning curve is fairy flat because of the Wizard and tutorials. You may find more information on DataScene at:

I would like to suggest the supermongo for scientific use. Although it is expansive but you can get it from your institute or research center. This is very user friendly and easy to operate. You can plot your data with high resolution and advanced settings.